How to Start an Indie Game Studio – Lessons From Joe Dietsch, Director Turned Wolf Haus Games Founder:
Figuring out how to start an indie game studio is not a question most people answer the same way twice. Joe Dietsch answered it by directing two feature films first, spending years in commercial and music video production, and then discovering one afternoon that Unreal Engine was free to download.
Joe is the founder of Wolf Haus Games and the creative director behind Join Us, a doomsday cult simulator heading to PC, Xbox, and PlayStation as a day one Xbox Game Pass title. He joined Ash Cason, Head of Marketing and Community at IndieGameBusiness®, on the Indie Game Business podcast to walk through the full path: from teaching himself game development through YouTube tutorials and late-night Unreal sessions to landing funding from Lifeline Capital and Krafton and building a twelve-person studio in Montreal.
What he shared is one of the more honest and specific accounts of how to start an indie game studio without a traditional industry background, without an existing network in games, and without a clean plan from the beginning.
The Origin Story – Film School, Feature Films, and a Free Game Engine:
Joe’s creative instincts go back further than film school. His first game was a missile command clone programmed on a TI-83 graphing calculator in math class. He got in trouble for it and decided the programming was more interesting than whatever the class was supposed to be teaching. That impulse never fully went away, but film felt more accessible. You had a camera, some friends, and you could just go make something.
He went to film school, graduated, built a career in commercials and music videos, and co-directed Happy Hunting, a feature that landed on Netflix in 2018. A second feature, Manifest West, followed. Then in 2021, he assumed Unreal Engine cost around three thousand dollars and had never bothered looking into it. The day he found out it was free, he downloaded it.
From there the pattern was simple: he kept waking up excited to go work in it. Some days the goal was figuring out how to build an exploding barrel, which in Unreal is not complicated but was a full day of learning at the time. The excitement did not wear off. That sustained excitement is something Joe returns to as one of the clearest early signals that he was pointed in the right direction.
How to Start an Indie Game Studio With No Industry Connections:
One of the most common questions around how to start an indie game studio is how to find the people to build it with, especially when you are coming from outside the industry. A community question submitted to the IndieGameBusiness® Discord asked exactly this, and Joe’s answer was direct about both what worked and why it was hard to generalize.
He had almost no games industry contacts when he started. His network was in film. So he worked with what he had: the few people he knew who were adjacent to games, and trusted them to introduce one specific person they thought should see the project.
The chain looked like this:
- Joe showed an early proof-of-concept to his long-time film collaborator Michael Abbott
- Michael introduced him to a writer who had worked on Assassin’s Creed, Army of Two, and Arkham Origins
- That writer introduced him to Reed, who runs Raccoon Logic in Montreal
- Each person either joined or introduced one more person they believed would genuinely connect with the project
- Nobody blasted the project to their whole network. Every introduction was deliberate and personal
This process eventually produced six co-founders and a team centered in Montreal. From late 2023 through early 2024, everyone worked nights and weekends while holding other jobs. There was no registered company and no money. Joe’s observation on that period is worth taking seriously by anyone researching how to start an indie game studio on limited resources: having no money means having no burn rate, which means having no artificial runway forcing a premature decision.
He watched other projects, including film projects, get burdened by taking on small amounts of capital too early. When people put money in before the timing is right, they tend to believe they still have a say in the direction even after their moment has passed. His recommendation is to wait for the right funding partners, even if those conversations take over a year. Lifeline Capital was the very first group Joe ever pitched. They did not invest immediately. They watched the team for more than a year to see whether the founders would still be working well together. Then they came in. Joe said he would have made the same call in their position.
The Concept Behind Join Us and Why the Tone Mattered More Than the Mechanics:
Join Us started as something much more contained. The original concept was a simple base-builder: a doomsday cult compound, ATF agents showing up in waves instead of zombies, rebuild during the day, defend at night. Something small enough to show a few friends.
Then the map started growing. A road appeared. A fishing hole appeared. A handcrafted open world roughly eighty percent the size of the Fallout 3 map took shape. None of that was planned. It emerged from building in three dimensions in an engine that makes spatial expansion feel natural.
The final concept is more specific than a survival game with a cult skin. You begin as a member of an already-thriving doomsday organization, get called up by the cult leader, and are sent to a small rural town to start a franchise. Nobody knows you. Nobody trusts you. You have to build something from nothing in a place that would rather you were not there.
The tone was the thing that determined whether people got on board or did not. In early pitches, there would be a moment around slide five where the room shifted. People stopped being unsettled by the subject matter and started laughing. The game takes something genuinely strange and presents it with a completely straight face. A cultist riding a pig while firing a flamethrower is funnier when the world around it looks like it takes itself seriously. The team identified that tonal contract early and protected it deliberately across every design decision.
What Film Experience Taught Him About Making Games:
Going from film into game development came with some accurate assumptions and at least one significant miscalculation.
The miscalculation: Joe assumed a game studio would feel like post-production in film, where editors work in isolated bays and everything is compartmentalized. He planned around that. What he found was that the team wanted to work together on an open floor, desks connected, people around each other all day. The energy was much closer to a film set than a post house. He adapted quickly, but the gap between his mental model and the reality was real.
What transferred well from film was the instinct to tell stories economically. Join Us communicates a large portion of its narrative through radio transmissions from the cult leader, who is never physically present. The player builds a relationship with this voice over time without the production cost of animating every scene. That was a deliberate choice rooted in years of thinking about how to do more with less, which is exactly the kind of thinking that commercial and independent film work tends to build.
The other major difference was temporal. In commercial work, if the sun goes behind a building in five minutes, you have five minutes. In games, you are on a multi-year timeline where tasks are non-linear and almost nothing is truly lost forever. Joe found this liberating rather than frustrating, but it required a genuine mental shift in how he thought about urgency and pacing.
Scope, Map Size, and the Feature Creep They Did Not Regret:
A twelve-person team building an open-world cult survival game with base building, follower AI, a handcrafted six-square-kilometer map, and fully modular construction systems is not a small undertaking. Joe acknowledged freely that the team probably should have cut more scope and did not. The game is built on feature creep in ways the team is honest about internally.
But the decisions that drove scope were not arbitrary. The map size is a good example. Six square kilometers is large enough to support exploration, multiple bases, distinct stories, and genuine discovery. It is also a size that a twelve-person team can fill entirely by hand with no procedural generation, which means every piece of it can be made genuinely interesting. A bigger map filled with grass and trees is easy to make in Unreal. It is also empty in the ways that matter.
The base building system went through significant evolution. Early versions used large pre-assembled structures that players assigned followers to. The team eventually moved to a fully modular system where individual components, planter beds, fences, decorations, large effigies, can each be placed and managed independently. Players can tend crops themselves or assign followers. The follower AI handles the same tasks the player can handle. It made the development work harder. It made the experience substantially more alive.
How Wolf Haus Runs a Twelve-Person Studio Without Bureaucracy:
Wolf Haus Games operates with minimal management layers. Joe is CEO and creative director, but the organizational structure is deliberately flat. When a team member who had come from a much larger studio pushed back on a system decision, Joe agreed on the spot and moved on. The team member was visibly surprised that a decision at that level could be made that quickly without escalation or review.
That speed is realistic at twelve people and may not survive a significant expansion without adding vertical management. For now, the practical habits that make it work are:
- Meetings happen when actually needed rather than on a default recurring schedule
- Quick questions go into private Discord rooms and take five minutes instead of consuming a calendar slot
- Everyone knows what everyone else is building because the team is small enough that full transparency happens naturally
- Decisions that belong to the person managing a system get made by that person, not routed through multiple approvals
This structure lets the team move quickly, correct bad directions fast, and implement good ideas without waiting for the process to catch up. Joe is clear that it is a function of scale and plans for it to evolve as the studio grows.
The One Thing He Would Tell Someone Starting Out:
Ash asked Joe what he would tell his earlier self. His answer came with the caveat that a much better version of it would probably surface at two in the morning.
The actual answer: prioritize the build. When you are figuring out how to start an indie game studio, there is a pull toward initiatives that feel important in the moment and rarely matter in retrospect. Company setup tasks, exploratory conversations, peripheral decisions, all of it can consume the time that should be going into the product. Joe’s personal test for anything generating stress or eating attention: if he will not care about it in three years, he should not care about it now.
He was clear that some of what pulled attention away from the game was genuinely necessary. But on balance, more time on the game and less time on everything surrounding it would have been the right call. For anyone working through how to start an indie game studio of their own, that is probably the clearest and most honest thing he said in the entire conversation.
Where to Find Join Us and Wolf Haus Games:
Join Us launches on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation as a day one Xbox Game Pass title. The game appeared in the Xbox showcase alongside Fable, Halo, and State of Decay, which Joe described as genuinely surreal to experience from the back of the theater with two teammates.
The Wolf Haus Games Discord is the best place to follow development and is linked directly from the Steam page. The Steam page also hosts a series of development blogs covering music, two-dimensional art, storytelling, and production details for anyone who wants to go deeper. TikTok and Instagram carry the most frequent new content and story updates heading toward launch, and Joe responds to DMs personally on both platforms.
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